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A comment on The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild. Parent comment

Re:The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kan... by coldtea on Saturday August 17, 2019 @12:28AM (#20722051)
>The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence.

If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...

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Re:The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kan... by kazinator on Saturday August 17, 2019 @12:47AM (#20722126)
That's if you know 90% of the words.

If you recognize 90% of the kanji and know what they mean, that's not the same as knowing words.

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Re:The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kan... by coldtea on Saturday August 17, 2019 @04:18PM (#20726085)
>That's if you know 90% of the words

No, I'm taking about the premise of the article: if you know 90% of the words most widely used (that is, the above 777 characters for example). Not 90% of the words in general.

If you know the most likely words, you can more often than not guess the unknown words in a phrase from the context.

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Re:The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kan... by kazinator on Sunday August 18, 2019 @12:14PM (#20731067)
I'm also talking about recognizing 90% in whatever text you're reading, not about knowing 90% of the lexicon!

My point is that those characters aren't words.

Well, some of them are, sometimes.

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